Bolan was on his feet staring down at the battered corpse of the Mafia capo.
As Johnny rose to his feet he saw a door inching open on the far side of the room. A hand holding a.38 revolver probed into the room.
Before either man could shoot, the person holding the weapon stepped forward.
"Angela!" Johnny said.
Her shoulder-length dark hair was matted with blood. An ugly gash on her forehead extended upward into her hairline. She held one hand over her left eye. Her white dress was splotched with dark red stains.
Johnny rammed a new magazine into the M-16 and waited.
The girl looked at the Executioner, her mouth tightened. The weapon was not pointing at either man. Her gaze moved to Johnny, then tears spilled from her right eye.
She took a step and they saw that she was wounded seriously. She staggered, then lifted the gun toward Johnny. She could not raise it high enough to point at him. Angela tried again and fired into the floor.
The brothers remained in place, both watching her, weapons ready.
She looked up at Johnny again. "I loved you, Johnny."
She tried to smile but could manage only a grimace of pain.
"Say… something, Johnny."
"You were born into slime, Angela. And you had a chance to rise above it, but you didn't."
Angela took her left hand from her eye and moved it down to the handle of the.38, trying to lift the weapon.
Johnny gasped when he saw her eye. A piece of shrapnel had caught it from the side, cut into it and jerked the eyeball out of its socket, leaving a mushy mass.
Suddenly the image before him was transformed to another face and raw fury overtook him.
Both her hands lifted the.38 this time and it came up strong and true, almost centering on Johnny's chest.
He did not let it complete the move. From his hip Johnny triggered the M-16. A burst of five 5.56mm slugs dug into Angela's chest, ripping her to shreds.
The leaden hail propelled Angela Marcello backward and she died before she hit the floor, the.38 bouncing once on the carpet.
Johnny walked over to Angela and stared down at her. He shook his head.
"We take the rear entrance," Bolan said.
Johnny gripped the M-16 at port arms and followed Bolan as they raced down the stairs and out to the patio. Fire had eaten into half the mansion.
The two combat-hardened brothers vaulted to the top of the block wall and jumped over the wire into the neighboring yard, went across two more backyards and then worked their way slowly toward the street.
A fire truck had arrived half a block down in front of the burning Marcello mansion. Another was on its way. Three San Diego police cars sat at the curb, red lights blinking. Dozens of people crowded the sidewalks behind the police lines.
Mack held the machine gun at the side of his leg as they walked quickly through the darkness to the Pontiac, which he had parked a block away. They stepped inside, put the weapons on the back seat and drove down the hill as another fire truck raced past them, heading for the blaze.
Johnny sat stiffly in the car seat not sure where Bolan was driving. He took a deep breath. There was work to be done. He knew he had to strike fast or Mack Bolan would be gone, perhaps for years. He had to do it now. He had to convince him tonight.
"Let's go to your hotel," Johnny said. "We have some planning to do."
37
It was after 4:00 a.m. when they parked at the Intercontinental Hotel on San Diego bay. Bolan broke down the M-60 machine gun and stowed it and the other special weapons in the suitcase, which he put in the trunk. He picked up two packages from the trunk and took them upstairs to his room.
They both sat on the edge of one of the twin beds.
"Mack, I have plans, lots of plans. I want to help you in your fight. I want to be a backup, a home base for you right here in San Diego."
"We'll talk, Johnny. But we'll both make more sense if we wait until tomorrow."
"Promise you won't vanish on me the way you did that day when I was fourteen."
"You got it," Bolan said.
Johnny fell back on the bed. He looked at his brother.
"I'll never see her again, Mack."
"I know the feeling," his brother grunted.
Johnny's eyes drifted shut and he slept.
* * *
The sun was at its zenith the next day when Bolan and Johnny settled down on the wide strip of warm sand at Del Mar, a small community just north of San Diego. There were no clouds in the sky and the reflection off the sparkling Pacific hurt the eyes.
Johnny brought his hand up to his forehead to shield the glare, trying to get everything worked out just right before he started. Bolan looked away from a pair of bikini-clad girls walking by and nudged Johnny.
"Okay, John-O, what's this big plan you nave?"
"Like I told you, I think you need a support base, a place where you can get some R & R now and then."
Bolan smiled. "When I started out fighting the Mafia, I was totally alone. Then Leo Turrin showed up and I had a kind of ally. After a while I got to know Hal Brognola. And they helped. Damned right they helped. But you, Johnny…"
"I was thinking of a permanent base here in Del Mar," Johnny said. "A house I've been looking at. It's perfect. Secluded, with beach access down a twenty-foot cliff."
"Might work," Bolan said, watching the waves. "But I'll have to see some plans."
Johnny's eyes glowed with excitement.
"I thought we could call it Strongbase One," he said. "The ground floor would be just like any house, but we can make the top story into a command center."
"I have one big question," Bolan said. "Is the beer we brought in that little cooler still cold?"
Johnny laughed, dug out two cans and gave one to Bolan.
"Well, what do you think?"
"Beginning to make sense. What about weapons?" the Executioner asked.
"Oh, they're in the basement. Down there we can keep all the small arms, and military-type weapons you'll need. You'll have to teach me how to get my hands on this kind of nonlegal material."
Bolan watched a pretty brunette walk by and then turned to Johnny. "It'll be good to have someone I can trust absolutely."
Bolan looked at his grownup younger brother, so horribly bereaved by the same enemy as his. Johnny was as tough as they come. Damn straight. He was a Bolan.
Maybe Johnny's idea was sound. A place for the Executioner to get some R&R along the hellfire trail. A place where he could cease to worry about every footstep, every shadow. Even though he was at home in the shadows.
"I know only this, little brother," he said finally. "I have always had a great fear, the one overriding fear of my adult life. It's been a fear that has lurked below the surface, hidden, something that springs out at me when I least expect it.
"The fear has been you, Johnny. I was afraid that one day my path would cross yours, that somehow you'd be bloodied by my war. I was afraid that your life would echo mine, that you'd feel the same swirl of blood around your ankles, breathe the same goddamn smoke of my battlefield."
Johnny looked at his brother, so rock hard even in repose. The youth's face was still ashen white from shock and loss, yet his eyes burned bright as he gazed at his own flesh and blood.
"But I no longer have that fear, Johnny. You've cauterized it, burned it out of me. I have just seen you leap into hell and I was glad. I saw you find out what it means to take an eye for an eye — literally, God rest our souls — and I was grateful to God that it should be. Because I am one with you now, Johnny."
The young man's eyes misted as he stared out to sea.
What a brother this was…
No, the hurt within him would never leave, could not ever leave him, but he had found the one true way to healing.
He had found Mack Bolan.
The Executioner.
His brother.
He had found, at last, his life.
Don Pendleton, Resurrection Day
Resurrection Day Page 25